Tracking and Sharing Documents via iWork.com

I purchased iWork ’09 the same day it went live on the Apple website. Writing and sharing documents is an essential part of my activities.

I moved to mac in June last year and haven’t looked back since. I made it a point to embrace the mac technology and philosophy right form the start and purchased iWork ’08.

The upgrade to iWork ’09 helped me improve tracking my correspondence with Partners and Clients with the share this document via iWork.com

All applications in iWork ’09 have a new functionality seamlessly integrated within the work flow process. Before iWork ’09 sharing a document required printing to PDF, and sending via Email. Now all you need to do is push the iWork.com button which triggers the process and publishes to the iWork.com site in native format, PDF or OFFICE equivalent. Publishing to iWork allows you to manage additional features such as allowing readers to download and/or leave comments. All documents published remain live for 120 days. I sent Apple some feedback with a few ideas on how they could improve this functionality – I hope they keep them in mind for a future upgrade of the system.

There is an additional benefit to all this: tracking documents.

Ever find yourself bitterly bitching because you can’t find THAT document you sent ? You know what you wrote, you know it’s there but it doesn’t show up when you run a search with SPOTLIGHT – GRRRRRR !

With iWork ’09 things just got a bit simpler …

When you share a document it is sent to your recipients – you compile a form, the information is used to send an Email along with the link to the document being published.

You’ll receive an Email with subject:

You’ve successfully shared “NAME OF DOCUMENT SHARED”

and message:

Your invitation email has been sent to 1 invitee:email of your contact

Now here’s how you can put this information to use and find shared documents.